813: Is That What I Look Like?
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From WB EZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Nancy Updike, filling in for Ira Glass. Today's show is a rerun, a good one, and I'm going to start with this story that I want to share. It's a little personal. I was at Mac, the makeup store, not the computer store, and I was buying foundation, which I almost never wear. It's the makeup you put all over your face to give yourself the pretend, perfect skin. And I asked the salesman for help finding the right color, and he looked at me and he said almost like he was thinking out loud. He said, "Your neck, it's so much more yellow than your face." And then he turned away to start looking for the impossible color that would solve this problem of the yellow right next to the so much more yellow. If you're thinking, "Oh, this was just a sales technique," to invent a problem and then offer to fix it with more products, I wish that that had been the case. But this was not an upsell. This was a credo-cur. The man really just seemed to be expressing his frustration at this stumper of my mismatched face and neck. This sort of out of the blue, perfectly sharpened comment stops you cold because it's not an insult. It's an observation that is true. You just hadn't thought of it before. It's shocking because you think, "I know myself. I know what I've got, what I haven't got. No one's going to spot something about me that I haven't already seen. That's not true." You can be among friends, doing something you love, feeling great. We were backstage, you know, getting ready to go on, preparing. This is Dee Watson. She was in a play a while back. And with all black women, we were all, some of us, all most of us were a little bit bigger than the average, you know, and it was a supportive atmosphere and the subject of big behinds came up, and me having one, I know all about it, and one of the younger cast members, she's about 25, said, "My mother thought your butt was so big it had to be a prop." Oh, my God. And at that moment, I didn't hear anything else anybody said. I just was, that was echoing through my head, and I could hear everybody laughing, and oh, my gosh, that's so funny. And I'm standing there about, I wanted to cry. I really wanted to cry, and I really don't think this young girl really meant to hurt me. Well, and maybe it's like, you know, we're all women, and so, you know, this is, it's safe here to say anything. Yeah. I think she thought I would think that was funny, and I, I did not. These are not statements that a human being forgets. The moment you hear the observation, it becomes part of how you see yourself. Seemingly forever, even something tiny, if it hits you right, can turn into this chirpy
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